Estimates Debate — Vote Environment

The Ministry for the Environment administers Vote Environment, and the Minister for Climate Change Issues and the Minister for the Environment are responsible for that vote. The 2013-14 Vote Environment appropriation is $326.5 million, and the Minister for the Environment is responsible for approximately 40 percent of that vote and the Minister for Climate Change Issues is responsible for the other 60 percent. Funding for Vote Environment tends to fluctuate from year to year, depending on the work streams or the roles of the ministry. In 2013-14 the appropriation is approximately double that of 2010-11 and slightly less than the 2012-13 appropriation.

The priorities for the Ministry for the Environment for 2013-14 are reforms in freshwater management and resource management, and also a new focus on environmental reporting. Ten percent of the vote, a total of $33.7 million, is for policy work and projects to improve water quality, and that is to follow up on the work done by the Land and Water Forum, and also the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management 2011, and for clean-ups of historically contaminated water bodies. The work streams in 2013-14 will focus on collaborative planning processes for water. They will also establish a national objectives framework. The idea of that framework is to set freshwater quality objectives and limits, and find ways to manage and allocate water within quality and quantity limits.

Almost $14 million is targeted to clean up waterways. It is great to see restoration projects in places like Lake Te Waihora, which is Lake Ellesmere in Canterbury, and also the Manawatū River, the Wairarapa Moana, the Wainoni Lagoon in South Canterbury, and the Waituna Lagoon.

The Minister for the Environment has also prioritised resource management reform. We need to maintain the quality of our resource management decisions, but we need to streamline the process so that we can be more consistent and more predictable, and we can reduce costs and get more timely decisions. We are already making progress on this. We passed the streamlining and simplification legislation, and we have had some very pleasing results from everybody who has been using that, and there is more legislation on the way.

Funding has increased under the appropriation for the Community Environment Fund. This time it is $6.4 million, and that is up from the $2.4 million that was spent in 2012-13. That appropriation is made to strengthen partnerships, to raise environmental awareness, and to encourage participation in environmental initiatives. There has also been an increase in funding for the Contaminated Sites Remediation Fund, and that increases to $5.4 million, which is over $5 million more than was spent in 2012-13. I think it is really important to see the Tūī Mine site. That was one of the worst-contaminated sites in New Zealand, and it has been successfully remediated. With the success of the work there and the increased funding, I think that will encourage other clean-ups in contaminated sites across the country.

New Zealanders are very aware that we want, and we need, to keep our environment clean and green. We really look forward to the results of this work being done on fresh water and the work that is also being done on resource management and on environmental clean-ups, and particularly there is an increasing interest with state of the nation environmental reporting.

In this brief call on the estimates for Vote Environment, I would like to continue from the previous speaker, Nicky Wagner, and talk about state of the environment reporting. This National Government has failed to implement its election promise to put in place independent state of the environment reporting. That was promised by the previous Minister for the Environment in about 2011, or before that in the manifesto. The current Minister told the Local Government and Environment Committee that she preferred indicative reporting in the meantime, rather than consolidated reporting. That means we get the information only in dribs and drabs.

But this week we got two quite significant indicator reports: the suitability for swimming indicator and the river condition indicator from the Ministry for the Environment. Certainly, the Government and Federated Farmers are spinning these Ministry for the Environment reports to try to hide the seriousness of our water crisis. The first of the reports, on swimming suitability, shows that 61 percent of the monitored sites on rivers are unsafe for swimming. In the House yesterday the Minister tried to argue that it was safe to swim in rivers that were graded “fair”. The Minister might want to swim there. I certainly would not, because in relation to those sites with a “fair” grading, her ministry notes “the presence of significant sources of faecal contamination,” and the ministry encourages people to avoid swimming there during or after rain or when the water is discoloured. For anyone who has swum in a waterway that is contaminated with faeces, whether human or bovine, it is a very unpleasant experience to get sick. I certainly would not want to swim there, even if the Minister does.

Within a generation we are losing the right to be able to swim in our local river or stream without the fear of getting sick. We have a freshwater crisis on our hands, and what the National Government is doing is going to make that worse. That is because it is opposed to smart regulation, it is gutting the Resource Management Act of its environmental principles, it is not putting a resource rental on the commercial use of water, and it is subsidising irrigation.

The Minister can talk—and the previous speaker, Nicky Wagner, did as well—about how much the Government is spending on cleaning up waterways. Of course, that is continuing programmes by the previous Labour Government in relation to the Rotorua lakes and Lake Taupō. Certainly, the Ministry for the Environment is proposing to spend about $9 million on the Rotorua lakes this year, but at the same time as that money is going for clean-up, the Minister’s colleagues, by subsidising irrigation to the tune of $80 million in this Budget and, potentially, another $400 million from the proceeds of asset sales, are making the problem worse. That is because irrigation leads to land-use intensification. The science is very clear. The more animals and the more fertiliser you put on land, the more water pollution you get.

Although the Minister and Federated Farmers President Bruce Wills might want to deny the seriousness of our water crisis and might want to put the focus on urban streams, again, that is spin. Urban streams, although they might have the highest concentrations of nutrients and bacteria, comprise only 1 percent of the total length of waterways in New Zealand. It is the 99 percent of rivers in our rural hinterland that we should be most concerned with.

We need to heed the warning in the Ministry for the Environment’s river condition report about the increase in nitrate levels at a quarter of the sites that were monitored in the 10 years to 2010. How do we get nitrate in our waterways? It is because of animal urine. The soil bacteria break down the ammonia in the urine and convert it to nitrate. What happens when we get nitrate? We have, for example, the medical officer of health in Canterbury issuing warnings about the increasing levels of nitrate in Canterbury aquifers and talking about that putting newborn babies at risk of blue baby syndrome. The effect that nitrate has is in compromising uptake of oxygen.

The Green Party wants to protect Kiwis’ right to swim in our local rivers. We would refocus the Ministry for the Environment back on sustainability. We would ensure that crucial environmental laws, like the Resource Management Act and like the exclusive economic zone legislation, really promoted sustainable management, had a precautionary principle at their hearts, and looked more closely at cumulative effects. We would focus on sustainability, rather than the exploitation of nature. The Green Party would keep our energy companies.

We are looking at the proud record in terms of the environment, some of which my colleague Nicky Wagner alluded to earlier, and I will pick up on that in a moment. But first I will look at the environment appropriation itself. It is interesting when you look at the breakdown, because when we look at the environmental side, we spend about $130 million, or 40 percent, of Vote Environment on the environment, and climate change takes up about 60 percent, which is $195 million. So when you look at the way it is spread across and you look at the reforms that we are bringing in, the Resource Management Act is certainly very much central to our initiatives and our policies around protecting the environment and growing the economy at the same time.

The Resource Management Act is certainly very important. Once this debate on the Appropriation (2013/14 Estimates) Bill is finished, of course, the Resource Management Reform Bill will be going into the Committee stage; it is progressing at a great rate. We have already introduced a couple of pieces of legislation around it, and there is going to be another, bigger tranche coming through later this year.

But let us look at the key components of the bill that we are dealing with at the moment, because I think that when you look at what this Government is trying to do with protecting and enhancing our environment, the key does remain within the Resource Management Act reforms. We are looking to further improve the resource consent regime. For those of us who have electorates and have people coming to see us, it has been a source of great complaint—the delays, the costs, the unnecessary nonsense, and, you know, just the impossibility of getting a job done. So we are continuing on with those reforms.

We are also streamlining the delivery of Auckland’s first combined plan. Within the Auckland Unitary Plan there are a number of complexities, and they are being carefully and slowly worked through with the cooperation of Auckland City and the various agencies there. We are improving the quality of local decision-making and also improving the workability of the Resource Management Act through some minor and technical amendments.

So those are the four main components of the bill that we are looking at. As I said, there are going to be even larger-scale Resource Management Act reforms, which will include substantive improvements for freshwater management and planning systems more generally, and they will be coming in a little bit later in the year. Water management and the protection of our waterways are what my colleague, the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee, alluded to earlier and went into some detail on, so I will not traverse that again.

When we look at what we are doing with direct referral, we see that these are the kinds of changes where the rubber really does hit the road and where people will notice a difference in their day-to-day lives—the DIY people and the people who actually want to get a fairly small project done. Decisions being made through the Environment Court, rather than through relevant councils, are going to improve and streamline that.

Six-month consenting is an excellent thing. We are going to allow medium-sized projects to get going without the red tape. Around about 1,600 medium-sized projects are processed each year, and that includes new subdivisions, supermarkets, industrial developments, and infrastructure projects. Those are the kinds of things where putting a time limit of around 6 months focuses people’s attention and gets the job done. The sorts of delays that we saw in my area, the North Shore and Albany, where a supermarket was held up for an inordinate length of time by an appeal process that was driven by a commercial competitor, are the kind of stuff we want to do away with.

The select committee process, as you will gather from the discussions that have gone on around the Resource Management Act, has been robust. People have come to us with submissions—genuinely felt, genuinely held submissions—and they have been debated at length and with some passion, rigour, and conviction within the committee itself, and we have made some changes. We have introduced a new approach, as a result of the select committee recommendations, to express time frames. The time frames were considered overly complex. We listened to that and made adjustments accordingly.

The Minister for the Environment, Amy Adams, has done what very few Ministers have done—that is, she has called all parties of the select committee together in her office and gone through in some detail their concerns in an effort to address them and in an effort to come up with a level of sensible consensus that we can all work with. I think that is the measure of the Minister and the reason why these Resource Management Act reforms are going through in the way that they are. They are big reforms. They need that level of consultation, they need the submissions that we have had, and then it is discussed and moved on. But it must be moved on. We are not going to follow the old Labour way of paralysis by analysis, where nothing much ever happens because there is no political willingness to make it happen. We make it happen, and we make it happen in ways that really do work for the public as well.

The subject of trees has been very contentious. There is not really enough time in the call I have now to go into the detail of that and to do it justice, but we have made significant amendments to the blanket protection of trees in urban areas, which was a pretty lazy way of doing it. Individual homeowners and landowners have the right to know and to plan with what they have.

It has been interesting to listen to Nicky Wagner and Maggie Barry in their analysis of Vote Environment. Of course, we do not dispute the statistics: 40 percent or so on the environment itself and 60 percent or so on climate change, which works out, in the case of climate change, to something like $195 million. But let us analyse that and ask ourselves what that money, that $195 million, is spent on. The short answer is that most of it has been spent on the allocation of New Zealand Units, which amounts to little more than generational theft—generational theft. The emissions trading scheme as it is currently fashioned by this Government amounts to a fiscal time bomb that will explode on the next generation, and not us. That is quite shameful. That needs to be scrutinised with greater transparency, greater honesty, and greater candour, and this Government needs to respond with greater creativity to get this right.

The deforestation that we are anticipating in the next 5 to 10 years is phenomenal. We have got through the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol by the skin of our teeth, not because we brought down gross emissions—they went up—but by the fact that our forestry went up through plantings 15 years ago, in the early 1990s and the mid-1990s, for tax policy reasons totally unrelated to climate change. Then we have completely messed up our climate change policy in the last 5 years, such that we are facing a massive amount of deforestation over the next 10 years. There is zero money under these estimates for the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative, but $171 million to the allocation of units to polluters.

Let me ask the Minister in the chair a number of questions about our emissions trading scheme policy. Just to pick up on the question that my colleague Eugenie Sage asked him earlier about how he will enjoy swimming with his children through faecal-contaminated rivers, my questions pertaining to climate change are the following. With regard to the UN target—if the Government can remember back that far, to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report—the prescription for annex 1 countries to keep within the 2 degrees Celsius and to play our share in reducing global emissions from 49 to 44 gigatonnes is a reduction off 1990, from gross to net, of 25 to 40 percent. This Government, in the form of Treasury and Cabinet papers, says it does not follow that New Zealand has to be within that range. Question No. 1 to the Minister: which countries does he wish to nominate from the annex 1 countries to make up the shortfall when we are not doing our share?

My second question follows. The Government has, in its ineffable wisdom, turned away from the second Kyoto commitment period, because that is a legally binding obligation. It says it will “elect to take its commitment under the framework convention”. Why? Well, especially because it cannot afford a legal obligation because of the wall of wood coming down the track, but particularly because it insists on looking forward and alluding to the 87 percent of emissions that are coming out of the developing countries. This Government, like those of other annex 1 Kyoto countries, is obliged to acknowledge the 77 percent of historical responsibility, acknowledge the continuing relevance of the common but differentiated responsibilities, acknowledge the difference that still obtains in per capita emissions, and acknowledge that it has a responsibility to be in Kyoto II. That is the second question.

The third question follows. The Government, in the form of Treasury, still bases its policy on the notion of global least cost. Does the Minister wish to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a global price or a global market on the carbon economy yet, and that there will not be for probably at least 10 years? There is a chaotic regional market coming out of Europe, from which, incidentally, Australia and the European Union protect themselves. But not this country. In its overzealous approach to an open global economy based on neo-liberal principles, it allows itself vulnerability to that.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Primary Industries